Managing data center maintenance and management costs is lucrative for businesses owning or operating data centers. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of an industry standard rack comprised of 42 1 U servers and aggregating to 13 KW is approximately $15,000 per month in a given data center. This TCO is astronomical, especially for information technology (IT) services in emerging markets. In order to achieve a significant reduction of the TCO, the cost components that drive physical design and data center management costs must be reduced. These cost components include costs associated with space, power, cooling, IT hardware, amortization and maintenance of facility power and cooling equipment, and operations processes for coordinating IT and facilities. Currently, an integrated design and management solution that addresses these cost components is not available to achieve a given TCO. Furthermore, motivated by sustainability and the economics of electricity generation, especially for emerging markets, the data center should be designed for efficient power consumption and for maintaining a balance of power with distributed power sources.
Current data center creation tools that deal with physical designs and configurations are fragmented. These conventional tools lack a unified synthesis and management system to enable a customer to integrate compute and facility hardware and software to meet TCO goals by minimizing component cost, assessing and ensuring reliability at a given uptime. The amount of active redundancy such as extra power and cooling components applied to the data center is based on rules of thumb applied, in excess, over the entire data center.